Responsive design - Media Queries - How not to load certain images

Question

Ok, So I designed a responsive layout that doesn't show images for very small screen sizes, using media queries and display: none;.

So far so good. But these images still download on these devices, causing an increase in bandwidth.

What is the proper way to make these images not download on the specified devices?

Any response would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

Two options I can think of:

1. Detect small devices on the server using browser-sniffing, and send them different HTML that doesn’t reference the images.
2. Display the images via CSS instead of HTML (in style attributes if you like), using either background-image or :before/:after and content (not supported by IE 6 or 7), and wrap that CSS code in media queries so that it’s only displayed by devices with larger screens.

Answer 2

The only accessible solution right now is to wrap the image with <noscript> tags, then pull the image out later with javascript. Cookies don't work on first page load (HTMLPreloadScanner), nor with CDNs. Browser-sniffing is useless if your images aren't always 100% of the viewport.

Slimmage.js implements context-friendly responsive images in 3KB of vanilla JS.

The markup is pretty simple as well:

<noscript data-slimmage>
  <img src="http://z.zr.io/ri/1s.jpg?width=150" />
</noscript>

Of course, you can make a server-side helper to even abstract this away.